When Sarah Solomon took refuge in an old cottage in the woods, she knew it would only be a matter of time before the monsters came a' calling.
Cursed with a power she neither wants, nor knows how to harness, Sarah has become a target, but who is he...
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TIME Magazine, once said of my father, 'a rising radical on the world's rich list, Marcus DiCenzo embodies the debonair of a 1930's Hollywood film star, with the alluring charm of Clooney and Banderas, and a little black book more well-thumbed than Jack Nicholson's.'
Sur-La-Terre Magazine said that DiCenzo 'represented a new, accessible era of the super affluent, where the flirtation with wealth appears less distasteful to the masses, and instead, encourages an almost obsessive appeal on the social media stage'although I did have to painstakingly Google Translate all of that from French into English so I can't account for accuracy.
The Daily Mail said 'super-rich playboy DiCenzo flaunts his sex-sational abs on board private yacht with hot catwalk model young enough to be his daughter' but I refused to read the rest of the article on account of the fact, one, it made me nauseous and two, I'd always fucking hated the Daily Mail.
This Marcus DiCenzo – the real one, and the only time I had ever seen him in the actual flesh for my whole entire life, as opposed to a two-dimensional cover star or gracing the gossip column – didn't appear to lack the appeal the media said practically oozed out of his pores. In fact, he looked barely any different to the man I'd despised from the moment my mother had told me who my father was, and when I'd spent an unhealthy amount of time Googling his name, his image, any seemingly inane piece of information that the internet had to regurgitate about him.
He was the man in those pictures. He did embody the debonair of a 1930's Cary Grant. And as for his little black book, well, I'd seen enough of those kind of Daily Mail pictures to wish I could scrub them from my memory, even though it now appeared that he'd had a secret long-term relationship with my own mother, and a centuries-old vampire called Dominique de Beauchêne.
How much of what I'd read and seen had been real? How much of it had been a façade about a man who had already been born again into the blood - as Montague called it - and who had been feeding the media exactly what they wanted to see, when the reality was that he already lived a very different life?
And what of that alternative life? I didn't want to take a step back, but I couldn't stop the images rising of my own father feeding on one of those young impressionable models dancing on board his yacht. I couldn't stop wondering if he'd killed and if he had, how many had fallen prey to the alluring charm of Marcus DiCenzo.
'You know, when somebody says they are pleased to meet you, it's often customary to say it back,' he said.
He stood, it seemed, quite casually, with one hand in the pocket of his black tailored trousers. His black shirt was open at the neck, and rolled at the sleeves, revealing an expensive-looking watch hanging on the wrist of his right hand. With his family originally hailing from Sardinia, he had a healthy Mediterranean look about him, with thick dark hair, slightly peppered with silver at the temples and the kind of glow about his skin that came from days spent in the sunshine, and not what I would have expected from someone who'd been technically dead as a human since just before I was born.
